As a business case, it's difficult to argue with avoiding licensing fees, avoid support issues... but what's surprising is that Robert Moores (from Leeds) says that everyone seemed to accept the downtime. Perhaps that's OK for students on undergraduate programmes (tho' it surprises me.... I find it difficult to believe that people are happy to wait to finish their essay/dissertation when they're in full flow and against a deadline, just because the system is down). Perhaps this is more because everyone now has a laptop and is able to do everything offline... so very few students are actually using GoogleDocs and Apps through LMU as their primary source of computing?
James Ballard (or is it Richard Davis?) from ULCC are now talking about Moodle and connecting it to Flickr, Google, YouTube and having central repositories etc. so on and so on and ... greatest respect to James and/or Richard, but this is all nothing new.I was hoping to learn how educators are engaging in MUVEs (Virtual Worlds). I was hoping to learn how educators are engaging with technology in the classroom, but getting students to use handheld devices or interactive whiteboards and how they are taking the classroom out of the classroom.
That was James, we're now getting Richard... talking about further repositories. All are essential, but these are issues of knowledge sharing and knowledge management, and as far as I can tell they have very little to do with education specifically.
We're now hearing specifically about repositories in Moodle... but as we discovered recently, Moodle is fine up to a point, but it is severly limited on any kind of Social Networking facilities. For that you need to plug-in Elgg, or similar. Then you probably need another system plugged in to actually do such things as blogging or online creation.
This is great for small institutions which don't have money for licenses and can grow as they go, but if you are a little bigger, and you want an all-singing all-dancing system that will work, more or less, out of the box, without any extra configuration to get things to fit, unfortunately you have to go for the big boys...such as IBM or MS.
Tim Marshall: "Progress: Tube staff man in perfect uniform with mohican. He's delivering a service but personalising his engagement."
True - this wouldn't have happened 20 years ago... and I agree that that certainly is progress. But more importantly, Tim is finally a good speaker... he's natural and relaxed at talking to the audience (he's chairing the panel) and, wonderfully, left his mobile on which just went off while he was by the microphone.
Unfortunately, when the others start talking, I switch off. They're not too coherent, they don't ENUNCIATE enough, and maybe it's because I'm stuck at the back of the room, but I have to strain to hear it over the click of my keyboard.
The law related to Cloud Computing is not the most pressing issue. Simone from Amazon explained how users can define where they want their data held, to ensure it doesn't breach regional data protection issues.
Now they're discussing whether or not there are issues related to others controlling your data... so if you run out of money (and can't pay the bill) can you access your data? Perhaps this is also a red herring. If you run out of money and can't afford a new server stack or have to sack 90% of your IT team, then you will probably also not be able to access your data. So the risks and benefits on this issue cancel each other out.
But I want to shout loudly (shame I'm too shy to do so) - WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR CONNECTION IS DOWN?!?
Perhaps I should be patient and see what happens, but no...morning session over and no one addressed the question at all.
Very big harumphs all around!
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